Little Green (26 page)

One of the two bodyguards whispered something to the one that lagged behind. This man in turn whispered to Huggins, who replied, “Okay, Turner, have your men wait outside. We’ll only be a few minutes.”

Huggins then turned to me, saying, “You too.”

“Not hardly,” I replied. “Jackson is skittish, and he paid me fifty dollars to sit by his side.”

“That’s right,” Jackson said. “Porterhouse here is the best friend money can buy.”

And so it was the five of us, there to do business in a particularly American fashion.

The layout of the room was a cream blue-footed sofa surrounded by three similarly upholstered chairs. The coffee table was frosted oak with dragon feet for legs. Jackson and Johnny sat side by side on the sofa while us others took the chairs.

Portia put the black briefcase on the table, opened it, and took out a contract sheaf. Underneath this document lay a few bound stacks of money.

“You have to sign each page,” the TexOk officer said. He handed Jackson a fancy-looking pen.

Jackson looked to me and I shrugged.

My mind was already past that room. I was wondering about dead men and their legacies, young men and their desire for fathers and revenge. I wondered what Mouse would do if he was Merkan. That thought made me grin.

“I been thinkin’ about this, Mr. Portia,” Jackson said, as we had planned. “I mean, once I do this I’m out. JP’ll fire me. He might try and put me in jail.”

“I will send you to spend the rest of your life in prison,” Portia promised.

“I know that. But here you want my signature and I don’t even have the gun.”

“I have no reason to burn you unless you betray me,” the VP said.

Betrayal
, I repeated silently. It was an odd concept for this criminal.

“But if I got to run I’ll need more money,” Jackson argued.

“Ten thousand is all I’m giving,” Johnny said. He was in charge and reveling in the power.

“How much did you pay the other two?” Jackson asked. “I’m the senior officer.”

“You’re just a monkey dressed up in businessman’s clothes.”

Turner, the gunsel, glanced at me. He was younger but I was larger. Wherever he came from, he had learned that black men don’t appreciate being talked to in that manner.

I looked back with no aggression in my eyes. If I had been Mouse, all three white men would have been in jeopardy by then.

That was when the connecting door came open.

Jean-Paul and Merkan followed their gunmen in. Turner leaped to his feet, but the two security guards already had their weapons out.

“Henry?” Portia said. He was too shocked to stand. “What are you doing here?”

Instead of answering Merkan went to the coffee table and picked up the papers.

“You don’t understand, Henry. This man came to me. It was his idea.”

Merkan looked from Huggins to Portia and back again. He took a deep breath and held it. Then he handed the documents to Jean-Paul, who immediately scanned the papers for the other two signatures.

“Go home, John,” Merkan said. “You too, Theo. Go home. I’ll have your offices packed up and sent to you by the end of the week.”

“Henry,” Johnny Portia said.

“Go.”

“You’re going to be sorry for this, Blue,” Johnny told my friend.

Jackson cowered even though he knew that he was safe.

After our guests were gone, Jackson, JP, and I sat in the sumptuous living room. Jackson’s face was glistening from sweat. It took all of the courage he could muster to face his blackmailers. I realized that over the years he had developed some semblance of personal bravery.

“ ’Ow can we repay you, Easy?” Jean-Paul asked.

“Hold that money and let me sleep in this suite tonight.”

“That is all you want?”

“It’s all I need,” I said.

Jackson and his boss left soon after that. I curled up on the sofa because I didn’t have the strength to make it to the bed.

“Sir?”

I was on a dusty road in Louisiana, the sound of war and suffering faint, and getting fainter, behind me. I was bone tired, but that didn’t matter, because I had escaped the conflagrations of a lifetime. Survived? Maybe not, but survival is overrated, as a man I once called friend often said.

“Sir?”

There was the mild scent of brine in the air. The ocean. Anthropologists, Jackson Blue told me, say that all human life began in Africa, but life itself had started one day when lightning struck the deep blue sea. That’s where I was headed, away from everyone else that was hating and bleeding and dying because they didn’t know any better.

“Sir, are you all right?”

My eyelids were stuck together by the teary secretions of sleep. I managed to get them partly open to see the short white woman in a blue housekeeper’s uniform.

“Hello,” I said, blinking at burning eyes.

She looked concerned, as if she didn’t really want me to awaken. Maybe she thought I was dead.

“Are you all right?” she asked again.

“I think so.”

“What are you doing here?”

The question confused me. The bewilderment must have shown
in my face, because the slightly stout, middle-aged brunette added, “In this room.”

“I was working,” I said, “for the man who paid for it. Jean-Paul Villard, CEO of Proxy Nine.”

It was her turn to be mystified. She understood all of the words but not coming from me.

“There’s a phone on the table over there, darling,” I said. “Call the front desk and have them check with Jean-Paul if you want.”

I got up from the sofa and walked deliberately to the bathroom. By the time I’d showered the maid was gone. I called downstairs and asked for them to send up a razor and a pack of Camels.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Rawlins,” the desk clerk said brightly.

They had called Jean-Paul, and he had paved my dark footsteps with gold.

“Hello?” Peter Rhone said, answering Etta’s phone at eight fifty-one.

“Raymond there, Pete?”

“He’s asleep, Mr. Rawlins.”

“I promise you he will be more upset if you don’t wake him.”

“If you say so.”

“Yeah?” Mouse said into my ear nearly ten minutes later.

“We got to talk, Ray.”

“Now?”

“It’s important and it’s business. Your business, not mine.”

“All right. What is it?”

“Down at my office,” I said, “in an hour and a half.”

“Whatever you say, brother man. I’ll be there.”

My car was valet parked by the hotel. Jean-Paul had made sure that everything was paid for. He’d also explained, probably to the
manager of the hotel, that I was to be treated like they would treat him.

In America money could buy anything, even pretend dignity.

I downed another bottle of Mama Jo’s elixir and pointed my car back toward the slum.

The word slum and the word slump are only separated by one hunchbacked letter
, Jackson Blue had once said.
That’s a hopeful sign
.

I had asked him why he thought so.

Because, Easy, a slump is just a temporary kinda thing. The fact that you in a slump means you gonna come out of it sooner or later
.

My energy increased with the drive, my optimism too. There was change on the wind and hope in the air.

My office was on the third floor of a block-long building between 76th Place and 77th Street. It was on a floor of various businesses owned by blacks and whites. There was a locksmith, a notary public, a seamstress from Eastern Europe, and a Negro lawyer who had whiter skin than most white men I knew. There was a theater company at the end of the hall, the Afro-American Mobile Theater Group, that had a room the size of a janitor’s broom closet where they rehearsed their civil rights plays seven nights a week.

The sign on my blue pine door still read,
EASY RAWLINS—RESEARCH AND DELIVERY
. That was the title I used before I had a valid PI’s license.

Mouse was blocking the sign. He wore a pink suit and a lime green dress shirt with a slender violet tie and a short-brimmed straw hat that had been woven by a master. There was no bulge or other evidence that he was armed, but that didn’t fool me.

“You plannin’ to go to some cotillion after our meeting?” I asked him as I worked the brass Sargent key in the lock of my door.

“Felt good to be alive this mornin’, Easy. Thought I’d put on something bright and happy.”

I just laughed and pushed the door open.

It was a midsize office, big enough for the extralarge desk that sat near the far window looking down on Central, and a blue sofa for the nights I might not make it home. I made my way behind the desk and took a seat. Mouse looked at the three visitors’ chairs and then at the closed door behind him. He moved the rightmost chair
against the far corner in front of a little recess formed by the outcropping of a structural beam.

Most men worried about sitting with their backs to a door, but that was usually just self-inflation and pretense. Mouse, however, truly was a man with enemies.

“What’s up, Easy?” he asked, leaning his chair back into the recess.

“Frank Green.”

Mouse grinned and shook his head.

“I used to have a girlfriend,” he said. “A woman who was a minister in a storefront Baptist church. She told me that she wanted to save my soul. I figured that was as close to God as I was ever likely to get.

“Anyway, Reverend Antonia used to tell me that whatever goes around comes around. I thought that was just some Holy Roller hocus-pocus, but then here comes Evander, and damn if that fine young minister didn’t know her words.”

“He’s Frank Green’s son?”

“Frank was a wild man, Easy. He make me seem like some kinda angel. Back when you had all them problems with him and DeWitt Albright, he had falled in love with a fourteen-year-old girl.”

“Timbale?”

Mouse nodded. “Grabbed her right off the street and locked her in a room in his house. Made her into his woman like he was some kinda wild animal ruttin’ after a mate. Then I killed him and Timbale went home. When they found out she was pregnant they kicked her out, and I been givin’ her two hundred dollars a month evah since.”

“Why?”

“Because I killed Evander’s father and her parents wouldn’t stand up for what was right.”

“Evander thinks he should kill you,” I said. “He feels that that’s his duty.”

“I understand that. I murdered his father. What else he gonna do?”

“Ray.”

“What?”

“Evander could no more kill a man like you than a fly could topple a lion.”

“So? It only matter that he try.”

“And if he does that?”

Raymond tilted his head to the side. “He’ll die like a man.”

“No.”

“No? What else could he do?”

“Not him, man, you,” I said.

“Me? What can I do?”

“I want you to deny killing Frank Green. If Evander asks you I want you to tell him that you didn’t do it.”

The consternation on Mouse’s face was almost comical. He pulled his chin in and raised his hands in a confused gesture.

I understood. He felt respect
and
responsibility for the boy. Mouse had killed his own stepfather and biological father at different times, in different conflicts. This was a way of life for him.

I wondered how I could explain that it was more important to keep Evander alive than to duel with him in order to show respect for his manhood. It was going to be a difficult discussion and possibly even dangerous.

It was almost a relief when the heavy thud came against my office door.

It wasn’t a knock but a strike meant to break the door in. There were a couple of extra bolts that engaged whenever I closed the door, so it took two more blows for them to break in. By that time Mouse was on his feet, plastered into the recess with that terrible long-barreled .41 in his hand, pointed, for the moment, at the ceiling.

For my part I grabbed the receiver of the telephone. There were two reasons for this: First, I thought that if the intruder had heard voices, the phone would be a good explanation for what he’d heard, and second, I wanted his attention on me and what I was doing.

Three big white men rushed in. They all wore cheap suits in dark hues: green and blue and gray.

Fear hit my heart like an electric jolt, and suddenly I was alive again for the first time since going over that cliff. It was a miracle that I had no time to contemplate.

I wasn’t worried for myself. It was these foolish men with their numbers and confidence, their last mistake if I, the living Easy Rawlins, didn’t think fast.

“Where is he?” the man on my right said.

“Who?”

“Evander.”

Just mentioning that name brought the white hoodlum closer to death.

“Who’s that?”

“Don’t try to shit us, brother man,” he said. “We talked to a girl named Vixie. She told us that she brought him out to a place in the woods up north.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I never go anywhere near the country.”

Incredibly the men hadn’t looked behind them. If they did Mouse would kill them. If they drew on me Mouse would kill them. If they mentioned Evander’s last name he’d do the same.